The Ideology of History and the Limits of Cinematic Realism in Andrei Zviagintsev’s Leviathan and Nataliia Meshchaninova’s The Hope Factory

This article brings together theories of history and filmic realism to analyze the representation of the provinces in Nataliia Meshchaninova’s The Hope Factory ( Kombinat “Nadezhda,” 2014) and Andrei Zviagintsev’s Leviathan ( Leviafan , 2014). It argues that these two films share a typically realist attitude of respect toward the profilmic in their striking figuration of provincial space through images such as one of the world’s largest nickel plants and whale skeletons as a sublime synecdoche for the ruined postindustrial landscape that is testament to the Soviet project of mastering nature. These representations provide a sophisticated articulation of Raymond Williams’s emergent “structure of feeling,” a receding sense of hope during the mid‐2010s attributed to the suppression of the Bolotnaia Protests. At the same time, the way in which the films construct provincial space as that of atavism and regression makes impossible the production of critique from within the represented world. The emergence of a superior “elsewhere” of the critical gaze complicates the films’ disavowal of progressive temporality and through it—the relationship between cinematic realism and historicity.